by David Wood
When Bones signaled that he had finished with his preparations, he and Maddock donned their dry-suits, stashing their street clothes and boots in water-proof stuff sacks, along with the dust masks. “We might need them later,” he explained, though the paper fibers were already so clogged with dust from the cave-in that their usefulness was almost certainly at an end.
The simple act of dressing down felt to Maddock like a declaration of optimism—a promise to the universe that they would not meet their fate in a submerged tunnel, miles from the surface—but there was also a practical reason for suiting up. The water, while not exactly chilly, would be cold enough to sap their body heat after prolonged exposure. The dry suits would stave off the worst effects, extending their reserves of energy and helping them keep their wits as the journey went on. Nora however, would have no such protection. She would be carried along like so much cargo—cold, wet, and effectively blind as they led her to an uncertain end.
Maddock and Bones both knew what the likely outcome would be, but neither gave voice to their apprehensions. Nor did they waste their breath with platitudes to inspire false hope. Instead, they moved with a sense of urgency, resisting the paralysis of inertia. As soon as they were geared up, they started down the narrow steps into the cylindrical shaft. Bones took the lead, cradling Uma in his arms, while Maddock trailed behind, holding Nora’s hand with a determined and insistent grip, compelling her to keep up. When they reached the waterline, Maddock and Bones carefully donned their flippers. Bones then descended the slippery stone steps until he was submerged up to his waist, whereupon he floated Uma, her light blazing, out into the dark water. Only then did he step off, treading water in the middle of the pool.
Maddock gave Nora’s hand a squeeze, and said simply, “Our turn.” Then, he too ventured down onto into the water, gently pulling Nora in after him.
The young woman shuddered at the first touch of the cool water but to her credit, did not balk. Before stepping off, Maddock held out the octopus regulator and repeated his earlier instructions. “Just breathe normally.”
She nodded, shivering as much from apprehension as from the cold, and placed the mouthpiece between her teeth.
With their full-face dive masks and underwater communicators, Maddock and Bones would be able to speak to each other, but there was little to say as they began their vertical journey. Both men held onto Uma, using the submersible’s bottom skids as handrails. Bones worked the manual controls, which were housed in a water-tight metal box that dangled like a short tail from the data port, while Maddock continued to hold Nora’s hand, signaling her through a prearranged set of gestures and squeezes, to remind her to breathe and Valsalva to equalize the pressure in her inner ear.
By the time they reached the transverse passage, Nora seemed to overcome her initial anxiety, settling into a steady rhythm of breathing, which allowed Maddock to focus on their surroundings, though there wasn’t much to see. The passage seemed a lot smaller than it had appeared when viewed remotely, but there was enough room form them to move through. Uma pulled them along at a brisk pace, faster than they would have been able to swim, but Maddock and Bones kicked with their flippers, adding what momentum they could to help overcome the drag of their bodies and hopefully, extend Uma’s battery life.
Maddock resisted the urge to compulsively check his pressure gauge every few seconds, choosing instead to monitor their progress with his dive chronometer. There was no way to judge speed or distance, and the passage was so featureless that there was no way to determine when they had passed the furthest point of Uma’s first journey. After thirty minutes had elapsed, he tapped Bones, indicating that it was time to switch places. Only then did Maddock check the pressure gauge. He was dismayed to see that he and Nora had already burned through nearly half his supply of air, but there was nothing to be done about it. It wasn’t as if they could take a break from breathing. In another half-hour, they would switch places again, but this time they would only be able to go maybe ten minutes, maybe less, before trading back. And after that?
After that, they would probably drown.
Maddock and Bones both carried pony bottles—small tanks that held a few pounds of air for emergency use—but those would only last a few minutes... A few minutes that they would spend in utter despair.
Maddock shook his head, and focused his attention on the journey, kicking in a steady rhythm and making gentle adjustments to the controls to keep Uma on course. Her batteries would last longer than their air supply. Maybe she would carry their dead bodies all the way to the end of the passage....
Stop it! He chided himself, but his brain refused to let go of the ominous reality of their situation.
Ten minutes ticked by, and ten more. The view ahead, revealed by Uma’s blazing xenon light, did not change. But then, just as he was about to signal Bones for another trade-off, he spotted a shadowy gap in the roof of the passage. The mere fact of something different, something to break up the grinding monotony of the journey, infused him with hope. He continued motoring forward until they were under the gap, and then switched off Uma’s fans.
It was an opening, big enough for two people to move through abreast. He angled Uma’s light up and saw a shaft continued upward at a shallow angle. Even more encouraging, the bottom of this new passage had been cut into stairs, just like those they had descended to reach the unfinished tomb.
“Bones! This is it!” The words felt strange in his mouth. It felt like years had passed since he’d last spoke. “Nora was right. There’s another tomb here.”
“Well, what are you waiting for?” Bones replied. “We’re not getting any younger here.”
Maddock suppressed a chuckle, and started purging Uma’s ballast tanks as he maneuvered the little ROV into the submerged stairwell. In a few seconds, they were cruising up the passage flying a few inches above the carved steps. “You do realize that this doesn’t change our situation a whole lot. This is probably the only entrance.”
“Yeah, but just think. Someday, somebody is going to find this place, and when they do, they’ll find us in a Pharaoh’s tomb. That’s way better than drowning in a sewer pipe.”
“I’m not really sure how, but...” Maddock trailed off as the light illuminated a shimmering, mirror-like plane cutting across the passage at an angle. Tiny eruptions were bursting across it, air bubbles from their exhalations breaking the surface.
They had made it!
SEVEN
Once they were above the waterline, Maddock removed his mask and took a breath. He had considered continuing to breathe from the SCUBA tanks a little longer, just in case the air was foul, but there seemed little point. The air was musty and tinged with the smell of decay, but seemed otherwise fine, which was a little surprising but welcome nonetheless.
Nora was shivering, her skin pale and clammy, but her eyes were wide in astonishment. “I knew it,” she said after spitting out the regulator and working her jaw. “We found it. Akhenaten’s tomb. This must be it.”
“Well it’s something,” Bones said. He had Uma tucked under one arm, its light still shining up the shaft. “Do you want the honor of being first in, or should we send Maddock? You know, just in case there are booby traps.”
“There aren’t any booby traps,” she said, though her retort seemed half-hearted.
“Not much of that mold, either,” Maddock said, swiping a gloved finger across the wall. The stone around them was stained black as far as they could see, indicating the presence of the same fungus they had seen before, but the accumulation was thin, as if the mold had died off at some point and was only now beginning to colonize again. Something about this nagged at the back of his consciousness.
“Well that’s something,” Bones said. “I guess we can toss the dust masks.”
Maddock shrugged out of his SCUBA rig, unclipped his wet/dry bag, and did exactly that, discarding the stained respirator before delving deeper. He removed a towel which he draped over Nora’s shoulders, and then
, without asking permission, began rubbing her vigorously to both remove moisture and restore her circulation. After a couple minutes of this, her color returned, after which Maddock and Bones stripped off their dry suits and pulled on their street clothes. Only then did they continue up the steps to see exactly what it was they had found.
The steps continued up another fifty feet before flattening onto a short landing that ended at a pair of doors which appeared to be sheathed in patinaed copper. Nora stepped close and began examining the panels which were adorned with the distinctive iconography of ancient Egypt. Maddock expected her to translate the hieroglyphic writing, but when she finally turned around, her face wore a troubled expression.
“It would seem that Sennedjem’s precautions were insufficient to protect the tomb.” She pointed to four evenly spaced holes on the door panels—two on each, positioned about where pull handles would have been placed on an ordinary door. “The seal has been removed.”
Bones raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You’re saying grave robbers made it through that tunnel?”
“I don’t know. I just know that the seal that should be right here is gone. Not just broken, but completely removed.”
“Maybe the tomb was never used,” Maddock suggested. He thought about their discovery of Akhenaten’s remains in the secret tomb in the American Southwest. The tomb and its treasures had been brought to the America’s by the Spanish centuries after the Egyptian king’s death, but it seemed unlikely that his mummy had ever occupied this place. “You said that Tut died before his own tomb was finished. Maybe this project got cancelled at the same time.”
Nora shook her head, more a sign of confusion than disagreement, then cautiously inserted her finger into one of the holes.
“Careful,” Bones warned, his tone uncharacteristically serious. “Did you check for a curse?”
“There’s no curse,” she said again, and then without any hesitation, crooked her finger and pulled.
The door swung away easily—too easily for Maddock’s liking. He braced himself, half-expecting spikes to shoot out of the walls or something equally terrible, despite Nora’s repeated assertions to the contrary, but nothing of the sort happened. Instead, the open door revealed a short passage which opened into a larger room. Even from outside the entrance, Maddock could see large objects inside the room.
“Come on,” Nora urged. She grabbed Bones’ arm and drew him—and Uma’s light—into the passage. Maddock followed, using his phone’s light to further illuminate the situation. Here too, a black stain bore witness to the intrusion of mold colonies, but it was faint, as if someone had recently wiped the stone walls clean.
The inner chamber looked more like a storage unit than a treasure vault. Large pieces of furniture, tables, altars, and life-sized statues crowded the space. There was even a fully intact chariot.
“Looks like the tomb robbers missed this place after all,” Bones observed.
“I’m not so sure,” Nora murmured. “Look at what’s not here.”
Maddock saw immediately what she was getting at. He recalled Howard Carter’s famous comments upon entering the tomb of Tutankhamun: “Everywhere the glint of gold.”
There was no gold here.
The objects in the room were made of wood, stone, and fired clay, but there were no precious metals or jewels in evidence. Nor were there any small objects. Everything in the chamber was too big to be easily moved.
Bones picked up on another absent item. “No mummy.”
“This is the antechamber,” Nora said. “It’s kind of the tomb’s garage. The mummy will be in a dedicated burial chamber.” She motioned to another pair of door panels set against the wall to the right of where they’d entered. “That way.”
“Is that where all the treasure will be?” asked Maddock.
“If this tomb follows the standard layout, the most valuable items will be in the canopic chamber, but the only way to get at that is through the burial chamber.”
The second set of doors, like the first, were unsealed, a fact that Nora’s deep frown said she found disturbing, though she did not say it aloud. She approached the entrance hesitantly, as if afraid of what she might find on the other side.
As before, the door swung open, this time revealing a larger chamber that was considerably less cluttered. In fact, it was almost completely empty, save for a pair of boulder-sized stone sculptures positioned in the center of the room. The exteriors had been chiseled with elaborate patterns, but atop each was the over-sized likeness of a Pharaonic figure lying in repose.
“Sarcophagi,” Nora said, breathlessly. She hurried into the room, examining the chests more closely. “Still sealed,” she said, with an audible sigh of relief before turning back to her companions. “This is the real treasure.”
Maddock nodded. “Any idea who they were?”
She pointed to a line of hieroglyphic symbols carved into the nearest sarcophagus. “This is the cartouche of Neferneferuaten, the predecessor of Tutankhamun.”
“You said that’s the name Nefertiti used when she ruled as king, right?” he asked.
“That’s one popular theory. There are a couple mummies that have been tentatively linked to Nefertiti, but until now, there has never been a sarcophagus positively identified as belonging to Neferneferuaten.”
“So if we pop the hood and find out that the dude has lady parts,” said Bones, “We’ll know for sure.”
“Let’s say, mostly for sure,” Nora amended. “There’s another theory that Neferneferuaten might have actually been Meritaten, Nefertiti’s daughter.
“Who’s in the other one?”
Nora pivoted to examine the cartouche on the seconds sarcophagus. “It’s Smenkhkare. After the death of Akhenaten, there were two rulers who held the throne for only a short period of time. Smenkhkare and Neferneferuaten. Not much is known about either one, except that there were tombs prepared for them in Amarna. Because they reigned such a short time—combined, just about three years—before Tutankhamun took the throne, it was always assumed that they were the male alter-egos of Akhenaten’s wives or daughters. DNA testing probably won’t help much since the family was so completely inbred, but if there are female mummies inside these, then we’ll know if that part of the hypothesis is true.”
She gestured to indicate the walls of the burial chamber which were covered in rows of hieroglyphs and larger brightly colored painted images of human and divine figures interacting. “These will probably tell the whole story, but it would take me a little time to translate them all.”
Bones moved in closer, playing Uma’s light over the stone chests. Maddock realized he was recording the discovery. “How do we crack these eggs?”
Nora gaped at him, aghast. “We don’t. Not under these conditions.”
Maddock decided not to point out that they probably wouldn’t get another opportunity, and instead pointed to another set of doors at the far end of the room. “Is that where we should find the canopic chamber?”
“Yes. That’s where the richest treasures will be kept, along with the canopic jars containing the vital organs of the entombed mummies.”
“Tempting, but I’m still full from the sandwiches,” Bones quipped. He finished his visual sweep of the second sarcophagus, and then motioned to the door. “Shall we see what’s behind door number three?”
Nora nodded and crossed to the last set of doors, with Bones right behind her, ready to document the big reveal.
“Drum roll, please,” he said, and then gave his best attempt at vocalizing the sound. “Badumba-dumba-dumba-dumba.”
Nora pulled the doors open, and then let out a gasp of dismay. Looking over her shoulder, Maddock saw why.
The canopic room was empty.
“No freaking way.” Bones shone his light inside. “I guess it’s true what they say. You really can’t take it with you.”
Nora shook her head. “No. Not that.” She pointed into the room. “That.”
Bones redirected th
e light and Maddock followed it to another doorway—this one without actual doors—on the wall to their left.
“Door number four,” Bones said. “I didn’t even know that was an option.”
“It isn’t. I mean, it shouldn’t be. Maybe it leads to another tomb.”
Something about the portal struck Maddock as odd, but it took him a few seconds to figure out what it was. “Fresh air,” he said. “Do you feel it?”
“You’re right,” Nora said, her expression brightening hopefully, and then just as quickly falling in disappointment. “That must be a passage back to the surface. I guess that explains what happened to all the treasure.”
Maddock’s stomach sank. “It’s not an undiscovered tomb after all, Somebody else got here first. I’m sorry.”
“And recently.” She sighed. “But it is technically still undiscovered. Unless the looters want to stake a claim.”
“I think you’re both missing the point,” Bones countered, nodding toward the opening. “Can we get the hell out of here?”
Maybe it was the infusion of fresh air, or reordering of priorities, but the significance of the discovery hit Maddock like a slap. “Uh, oh,” he muttered. At a quizzical glance from Nora, he went on. “Don’t you get it? This is why they tried to kill us.”
“They?”
Bones figured it out right away, echoing Maddock’s dismay. “Crap. It all makes sense. The guys that tried to rob us at the train station... They were trying to keep us from exploring that passage because they knew we’d eventually find this.”